Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (38 page)

After the White Sox lost the first game, Dahl, dressed in army fatigues and helmet, took the field in a jeep, accompanied by Lorelei, a blond bombshell who was one of Dahl’s sidekicks, and proceeded to set off a number of explosives inside a box containing ten thousand disco records. Immediately after the explosion, fans started to jump over the outfield walls from the bleachers. Soon, there were hundreds of fans on the field, setting bonfires in the outfield, tearing up the grass, stealing the bases, destroying the batting cage and the pitcher’s mound, and enagaging in oral sex on home plate. White Sox broadcaster Harry Caray took to the stadium’s PA system to beg people to return to their seats; some of the fans who had remained in their seats began chanting (to the tune of Steam’s “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye”), “Na na na na, na na na na, hey assholes, sit down!”; and, finally, a shaken Bill Veeck went out to home plate with a microphone to calm the crowd, but to no avail. Only the appearance of police on horseback quelled the riot. The field was so damaged that the White Sox had to forfeit the second game.
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Dahl’s campaign was hardly an isolated instance of masculine energy run amok against the feminizing influence of disco. Detroit, that other crumbling icon of the Rust Belt and home to thousands of disaffected teenage rock-and-roll burnouts incensed that Bianca Jagger had superseded Mick as a cultural symbol, had its own antidisco campaign. DREAD (Detroit Rockers Engaged in the Abolition of Disco), whose logo was a meat cleaver smashing a record with the inscription “Saturday Night Cleaver” below it, was an organization sponsored by rock radio station WRIF.
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Card-carrying members—who had to swear that they would never wear platform shoes, zodiac jewelry, silk dresses, or three-piece suits—would be entitled to discounts on Styx and Boston records at local music chain Harmony House and to half-price entry to the Cranbrook Planetarium, which staged “Laser Pink Floyd” every weekend. The trend for destroying disco records was probably started in the summer of 1978 by a DJ in San Jose, California, calling himself Dennis Erectus. His show, Erectus Wrecks a Record, for radio station KOME (with promotional ads like “the KOME spot on your dial” and “Have you KOME today?”) featured Erectus playing a couple of bars of a disco record, “then crank[ing] the turntable up to 78 rpm (especially effective on ‘Macho Man’), grind[ing] the needle into the vinyl, play[ing] sound effects of toilets flushing or people throwing up, and follow[ing] it up with the searing guitar chords of Van Halen or AC/DC.”
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New York’s WPIX, the station that had the world’s first disco program, soon followed suit when it introduced its new all-rock format in January 1979 with “record-breaking weekends.” Then, the deluge: In Los Angeles, KROQ DJ “Insane” Darrell Wayne buried disco albums in the sand as part of a disco funeral at Ventura Beach; in Portland, Oregon, KGON DJ Bob Anchetta destroyed stacks of disco records with a chain saw; Seattle station KISW had a nightly show called “Disco Destruction”; on the weekend of April 13–15, 1979, DJs Sue O’Neil and Glen Morgan of New York Top 40 station WXLO staged a “No Disco Weekend”; ads in the back of
Rolling Stone
for “Death to Disco” and “Shoot the Bee-Gees” T-shirts started appearing as early as 1978; in Oklahoma, J. B. Bennett ran (unsuccessfully) for a state senate seat on an antidisco platform, calling it a “corrupting influence on our young citizens.”
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Nor was the rage of the angry white man confined to America. A 1979 edition of the ultra-right-wing British National party’s
The Young Nationalist
warned, “Disco and its melting pot pseudo-philosophy must be fought or Britain’s streets will be full of black-worshipping soul boys.”
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Meanwhile, scientists at the University of Ankara in Turkey “proved that listening to disco turned pigs deaf and made mice homosexual.”
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Nevertheless, it was the melee at Comiskey Park that became “the shot heard round the world” in the antidisco campaign. While America had a long history of moral panics over dance crazes—from Reverend Billy Sunday calling the tango “the rottenest, most putrid, stinkingest dance that ever wriggled out of the pot of perdition”
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in 1915 to Southern preachers condemning rock and roll as “jungle music”—the Comiskey Park riot, as well as most of the flare-ups of antidisco sentiment, seemed to spring up spontaneously out of the will of people who just couldn’t take it anymore. However, the “disco sucks” movement had all the hallmarks of a Nazi Kulturkampf—of the collaborationists in Paris rounding up Les Zazous—or at least the coordinated record burnings that accompanied John Lennon’s pronouncement that the Beatles were bigger than God, and a large part of it was actually carefully orchestrated from afar. Lee Abrams of the radio-consulting firm Burkhart-Abrams Associates was a consultant for WLUP when Dahl began his campaign, and in May 1979 he advised his other clients that Dahl had found remarkable success with it.
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Abrams also based his antidisco advice on the findings of independent media consultant John Parikhal, who set up focus groups of, and sent out questionnaires to, fifteen- to twenty-five-year-olds in Canada. “They thought disco was superficial, boring, repetetive, and short on ‘balls’… They were also intimidated by the lifestyle—partly by its emphasis on physical and sartorial perfection, partly because its atmosphere is so charged with sex … Rock fans’ disparaging characterization of disco as music for gay people seemed linked to their perception that it hasn’t got balls … At the same time they resented it for pressuring them to be sexual … Obviously, some people dislike disco for being black and gay. It’s an exclusionary assertion of sophistication and confidence by the same two groups whose most recent attempts at economic and political self-assertion met with the notorious backlash responses of Allan Bakke [who effectively started the anti–affirmative action movement in the United States by contesting the University of California medical school’s minority-admissions quota] and Dan White [a disgruntled former San Francisco supervisor who murdered openly gay Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone in 1978].”
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Coming from Chicago—a place that poet Carl Sandburg once dubbed the “City of the Big Shoulders” and whose character is largely defined by the substantial population of white ethnics that Nixon turned into his silent majority—Dahl’s disco riot was emblematic of the politics of resentment of the white everyman that would enable the 1980s conservative revolution. The disco riot was a weird tangent to the skirmishes—beginning with Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew assailing the liberal media as the “nattering nabobs of negativism” in 1970 and the 1974 battle over the presence of books by black power activist Eldridge Cleaver and Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in a school library in West Virginia—that finally escalated into a full-fledged culture war when Reverend Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979. That same year, the “pro-God, pro-family” former beauty queen and orange juice shill Anita Bryant fought to have gay rights ordinances repealed in Miami, Florida, St. Paul, Minnesota, Wichita, Kansas, and Eugene, Oregon. She called her campaign “Save Our Children,” and one of her refrains was, “If homosexuality were the normal way, God would have made Adam and Bruce.”
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Despite her efforts, it was Steve Dahl and his foot soldiers—even though they were the ones who desecrated the altar—who managed to have the most visible flowering of gay liberation excommunicated from the church of American popular culture.

It wasn’t just deviant sexuality, though, that rankled the straight white male of the Midwest. It was something far worse: impotence. Detroit had once been the shining industrial beacon of the American economic miracle. Its massive car factories provided high-paid blue-collar jobs to just about everyone, and the images of third-generation Germans, Jews, recent Polish immigrants, and newly arrived African Americans from the Deep South working side by side on the shop floor were enduring symbols of both the might and beneficence of American capitalism. In the face of the gasoline crises of 1973 and 1979, and with a tsunami of cheap Japanese cars flooding the country, Motor City was in deep trouble. In the freezing winter of 1976–77, the electric company was forced to cut voltage throughout the state of Michigan, “dimming lights and darkening moods,” as historian Bruce Schulman put it.
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The beacon was shining no more.

Not only was America overly dependent on foreign oil, but the dollar was now hitting all-time lows against the German mark and Japanese yen. Inflation was running rampant, exacerbated by OPEC price increases, and President Jimmy Carter seemed powerless to do anything about it. As interest rates rose to unprecedented levels, Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, announced that Americans’ standard of living would decline for the first time in living memory. The ultimate humiliation, though, occurred on November 4, 1979, when Fundamentalist Muslim students stormed the American embassy in Tehran, Iran, and took its sixty-six occupants hostage. America’s might had not only been questioned but openly mocked by a country that had escaped feudalism a mere twenty-five years earlier. With its mincing campness, air-brushed superficiality, limp rhythms, flaccid guitars, fey strings, and overproduced sterility, disco seemed emblematic of America’s dwindling power. The high falsettos of disco stars like the Bee Gees and Sylvester sounded the death knell for the virility of the American male. Disco came from New York, “Sodom on the Hudson,” the home of both namby-pamby knee-jerk liberals and Spiro Agnew’s “Northeast liberal media elite.” Viewed in this context, Dahl’s military pomp makes a bit of sense: He was waging a war on the enemy within that was draining America of its life force.

Dahl’s shenanigans wouldn’t be the last we would hear from disco in the sacred confines of the ballpark, though. In fact, that very same year, Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” was the theme song of the Pittsburgh Pirates. The song, which quickly became an anthem for feminists and gay rights activists, was put back in the hands of the patriarchy at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium. The team was nicknamed “The Family” and its captain was thirty-nine-year-old Willie “Pops” Stargell, who would often lead the fans in singing the song’s chorus during games. Even though the Pirates went on to win the World Series that year with the song as their soundtrack, the sanitization of disco had begun. It was now safe to be used as fodder for car advertisements and highlight reels: The graffiti were on the wall and disco was dead.

However, for those really paying attention, the first alarm bell that signaled disco’s death—and the birth of something new—in the mainstream was set off in October 1977 during the World Series between the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Yankee Stadium is situated at 161st Street and River Avenue on the west end of the South Bronx, at the time probably the most notorious urban area on earth. During game one of the series, which took place in the evening, the sky surrounding the stadium was noticeably orange, and ABC, the network televising the game, frequently cut to aerial shots provided by the ever-present Goodyear blimp of buildings on Charlotte Street, a couple of miles to the northeast of the stadium, burning to the ground. During one of these shots, the sportscaster Howard Cosell announced to the nation, “There it is again, ladies and gentlemen. The Bronx is burning.”

During the mid-1970s, the South Bronx had an average of twelve thousand fires a year; it lost 40 percent of its housing stock and 57 percent of its population.
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The infant mortality rate in this twelve-square-mile area was twenty-nine per one thousand births (the national average was thirteen per one thousand), and 25 percent of the city’s malnutrition cases occurred here.
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The reasons for this degeneration were numerous: the building of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, completed in 1963, had destroyed many previously tight-knit, middle-class neighborhoods, creating “instant slums”
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in their place; high city taxes had forced many of the borough’s manufacturing businesses to relocate to the suburbs or out of state altogether; in the late 1950s, the city began a policy whereby a substantial number of welfare recipients were essentially “dumped” in the South Bronx by offering landlords above-market rents to house them; Housing Preservation and Development Administrator Roger Starr’s policy of “planned shrinkage,” which advocated that many essential services be removed from “sick” neighborhoods in order to concentrate diminishing resources elsewhere;
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and, most crucially of all, building owners realized that they could recoup some of their failing investments through fire insurance payments. “Some of the fires were accidents, the inevitable result of decaying electrical systems,” wrote journalist Robert Worth. “Many were set by landlords who would then collect the insurance money. Often they would sell the building—whether it was still inhabited or not—to ‘finishers’ who would strip out the electrical wiring, plumbing fixtures, and anything else that could be sold for a profit before torching it. ‘Sometimes there’d be a note delivered telling you the place would burn that night,’ one man who lived through the period told me. ‘Sometimes not.’ People got used to sleeping with their shoes on, so that they could escape if the building began to burn.”
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While the residents of “Fort Apache” were suffering with a median income of $5,200 (around half the New York City average), the absentee landlords were making out like bandits: In 1975 alone, they earned $10 million in insurance payouts.
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Decimated by such neglect and horrible planning decisions, faced with a crime rate spiraling out of control, and with no reason for civic pride, the Bronx became a brutal place to live. The first generation of 1970s children and teenagers in the Bronx was the first group to try to piece together bits from this urban scrap heap. Like carrion crows and hunter-gatherers, they picked through the debris to create their own sense of community, finding vehicles for self-expression from cultural ready-mades, throw-aways, and aerosol cans. If disco’s clubgoers, DJs, musicians, and producers were fiddling while New York burned, these kids from the Bronx were trying to make sculptures from the cinders. What rose from the ashes was hip-hop, and mainstream America first caught sight of its milieu in the fires outside of Yankee Stadium on that crisp October night in 1977.